EduTech Africa 2017 Day Two – Spot The Teacher!

04Oct

Trying to extract the main theme of the second day at the EduTechAfrica Conference is a bit like trying to spot the ball in one of those popular press football competitions from my youth! Mark Sham set the tone by calling on the conference to dismantle schooling entirely! He reminded us that schooling’s function is to reinforce inequality in society, and in a world where artificial intelligence threatens almost all our jobs, schooling, by stifling creativity, critical thinking and problem solving skills is not just broken, but is positively dysfunctional.

Dee Moodley on the other hand talked about the importance of Presence, that almost indefinable human aspect to education, the human touch that all teachers need. Neelam Parmar stressed the need to drive change through reshaping education through experiential learning. People need to look forward to change! Meanwhile the coding and robotics people were agonizing over how to manage a coding across the curriculum agenda, and in another track the process of managing ICT integration technically and in terms of human resources was being poured over. Mark Hayter and Lora Foot reminded us that teachers need to be able to function within newly imagined learning spaces.

The mantra for the day was perhaps “the teacher is still the driver”. And yet the role of the teacher is clearly a contested space. There are many visions of the teacher at stake: the teacher as someone who needs to be converted as ICT Champion; the teacher who needs coaxing and mentoring to overcome their fear of technology; the teacher who must nurture or engage her students; the teacher who must experiment and play; the teacher who must surrender control of the classroom. The teacher who must oversee the dismantling of the schooling system itself!

What is perhaps most clear is that the role of teachers is as uncertain as the role of technology in education itself. We are at that wonderful moment, perhaps, where there are as many visions of the future as there are eyes to see, and anything is possible. What frightens me, frankly is that the rise of big data may well overtake these democratic impulses and squash them with a technocratic Taylorist vision of educational efficiency. In a world where Betsy de Vos can run the education system in America, technology may well become an authoritarian nightmare!

Perhaps the only bulwark against this might be to find the teacher in the picture and ensure that teaching and learning remains a deeply humanistic endeavour. Only by finding the teacher can we ensure that values are central to our schooling system.